The massive emergence of image generators based on artificial intelligence learning from billions of images sourced from the internet. It is now possible with the open source Stable Diffusion model to generate a realistic image, it was only a matter of time before erotica and then porn could be generated in the same way.
The possibilities for pornographic creations come from the dataset of the Large-scale Artificial Intelligence Open Network (LAION), a non-profit organisation that focuses on artificial intelligence and holds no less than 5.6 billion images gathered from the Internet in its open-source 5B database. Even though the sample of images was reduced to only 120 million items, thanks to an AI that was trained to remove as much pornographic content as possible. It was still possible to use the model… and to misuse it. A small community reused #NSFW content to retrain the AI. The administrators of these new algos therefore recruited volunteers, mainly members of their Discord server, to create porn data sets to refine the Stable Diffusion model. So the process is the same as when I retrained it with my photos to create new avatars.
In the realm of porn, the effects may not be as blatant, but it is still particularly disturbing to watch an AI distort and enhance ordinary people until they become racialized and gendered caricatures.
AI-generated porn is growing in popularity. But will it simply become another man’s world?
Despite the presence of Not Safe For Work (NSFW) content filters in these AI generators, users continually seek ways to circumvent these safeguards. A simple Google search for ‘AI porn-generator’ reveals a plethora of options, granting access to explicit content generated with relative ease. Notably, websites like Unstable Diffusion and PornPen emerged in August 2022, quickly becoming havens for AI-generated explicit content, and amassing significant followings in the process.
